Evening Is the Whole Day: A Novel

Copyright © 2008 by Preeta Samarasan

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Samarasan, Preeta.

Evening is the whole day / Preeta Samarasan.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-618-87447-7

ISBN-10: 0-618-87447-x

1. East Indians—Malaysia—Fiction. 2. Immigrants—Malaysia—Fiction. 3. Upper class families—Fiction. 4. Malaysia—Fiction. I. Title.

PR9530.9.S26E94 2008

813'.6—dc22 2008004729

eISBN 978-0-547-52612-6

v2.0814

The author is grateful for permission to quote from the following:

Sparrow by Paul Simon. Copyright © 1963 Paul Simon. Used by permission of the Publisher: Paul Simon Music.

Cecilia by Paul Simon. Copyright © 1969 Paul Simon. Used by permission of the Publisher: Paul Simon Music.

The Sun Is Burning. Words and music by Ian Campbell. Copyright © 1964 (Renewed), 1965 (Renewed) TRO Essex Music Ltd., London, England TRO–Essex Music, Inc., controls all publication rights for the USA and Canada. Used by permission.

Mera Juta Hai Japani, by Shailendra Singh. Copyright © 1955 by Saregama India Ltd. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Darling Darling Darling by Ilaiyaraja. Used by permission of the Indian Record Mfg. Co. Ltd.

For Mom, Pop, and my brothers,

who taught me that words matter

History begins only at the point where things go wrong; history is born only with trouble, with perplexity, with regret. So that hard on the heels of the word Why comes the sly and wistful word If. If it had not been for . . . If only . . . Were it not . . . Those useless Ifs of history. And, constantly impeding, deflecting, distracting the backward searchings of the question why, exists this other form of retrogression: If only we could have it back. A New Beginning. If only we could return . . .

—from Waterland by Graham Swift

The sun goes down and the sky reddens, pain grows sharp,

light dwindles. Then is evening

when jasmine flowers open, the deluded say

But evening is the great brightening dawn

when crested cocks crow all through the tall city

and evening is the whole day

for those without their lovers.

—Kuruntokai 234, translated by George L. Hart

1

The Ignominious Departure of Chellamservant Daughter-of-Muniandy

September 6, 1980

THERE IS, stretching delicate as a bird’s head from the thin neck of the Kra Isthmus, a land that makes up half of the country called Malaysia. Where it dips its beak into the South China Sea, Singapore hovers like a bubble escaped from its throat. This bird’s head is a springless summerless autumnless winterless land. One day might be a drop wetter or a mite drier than the last, but almost all are hot, damp, bright, bursting with lazy tropical life, conducive to endless tea breaks and mad, jostling, honking rushes through town to get home before the afternoon downpour. These are the most familiar rains, the violent silver ropes that flood the playing fields and force office workers to wade to bus stops in shoes that fill like buckets. Blustering and melodramatic, the afternoon rains cause traffic jams at once terrible—choked with the black smoke of lorries and the screeching brakes of schoolbuses—and beautiful: aglow with winding lines of watery yellow headlights that go on forever, with blue streetlamps reflected in burgeoning puddles, with the fluorescent melancholy of empty roadside stalls. Every day appears to begin with a blaze and end with this deluge, so that past and present and future run together in an infinite, steaming river.

In truth, though, there are days that do not blaze and rains less fierce. Under a certain kind of mild morning drizzle the very earth breathes slow and deep. Mist rises from the dark treetops on the limestone hills outside Ipoh town. Grey mist, glowing green hills: on such mornings it is obvious how sharply parts of this land must have reminded the old British rulers of their faraway country.

To the north of Ipoh, clinging to the outermost hem of the town’s not-so-voluminous outskirts, is Kingfisher Lane, a long, narrow line from the main road (one corner shop, one bus stop, occasional lorries) to the limestone hills (ancient, inscrutable, riddled with caves and illegal cave dwellers). Here the town’s languid throng feels distant even on hot afternoons; on drizzly mornings like this one it is absurd, improbable. The smoke from the cement factories and the sharp odors of the pork van and the fish vendor are washed away before they can settle, but the moist air traps native sounds and smells: the staticky songs of one neighbor’s radio, the generous sweet spices of another’s simmering mutton curry. The valley feels cloistered and coddled. A quiet benevolence cups the morning in its palm.

In 1980 the era of sale-by-floorplan and overnight housing developments is well under way, but the houses on Kingfisher Lane do not match one another. Some are wide and airy, with verandas in the old Malay fashion. A few weakly evoke the splendor of Chinese towkays’ Penang mansions with gate-flanking dragons and red-and-gold trim. Most sit close to the lane, but one or two are set farther back, at the ends of gravel driveways. About halfway down the lane, shielded by its black gates and its robust greenery, is the Big House, number 79, whose bright blue bulk has dominated Kingfisher Lane since it was an unpaved track with nothing else along it but saga trees. Though termites will be discovered, in a few weeks, to have been secretly devouring its foundation for years (and workmen will be summoned to an urgent rescue mission), the Big House stands proud. It has presided over the laying of all the others’ foundations. It has witnessed their slow aging, their repaintings and renovations. Departures, deaths, arrivals.

This morning, after only a year at the Big House, Chellam the no-longer-new-servant is leaving. Four people strain to believe that the fresh weather augurs not only neat closure, but a new beginning. Clean slates and cleaner consciences. Surely nothing undertaken today will come to a bad end; surely all’s well with the world.

Chellam is eighteen years old, the same age as Uma, the oldest-eldest daughter of the house. Only one week ago today, Uma boarded a Malaysian Airline System aeroplane bound for New York America USA, where it is now autumn. Also known as fall in America. She left behind her parents, her eleven-year-old brother Suresh, and little Aasha, only six, whose heart cracked and cried out in protest. Today the four of them thirstily drink the morning’s grey damp to soothe their various doubts about the future.

The aeroplane that carried Uma away was enormous and white, with a moonkite on its tail, whereas Chellam is leaving on foot (and then by bus).

She differs from Uma in many other, equally obvious, ways. A growth spurt squandered eating boiled white rice sprinkled—on good days—with salt has left her a full head shorter than Uma; her calves are as thin as chicken wings and her skin is pockmarked from the crawling childhood diseases her late mother medicated with leafy pastes and still-warm piss furtively collected in a tin pail as it streamed from the neighbors’ cow. Severe myopia has crumpled her face into a permanent squint, and her shoulders are as narrow as the acute triangle of her world: at one corner the toddy shop from which she dragged her drunken father home nightly as a child; at another the dim, sordid alley in which she stood with other little girls, their eyelids dark with kajal, their toenails bright with Cutex, waiting to be picked up by a lorry driver or a bottle-shop man so that they could earn their two ringgit. At the third and final corner stands Ipoh, the town to which she was brought by some bustling, self-righteous Hindu Sangam society matron eager to rack up good karma by plucking her from prostitution and selling her into a slavery far less white; Ipoh, where, after two-three years (no one could say exactly) of working for friends of Uma’s parents, Chellam was handed down to the Big House. We got her used, Suresh had said with a smirk (dodging his Amma’s mouthslap, which had been offhand at best, since Chellam hadn’t been there to take offense).

And today they’re sending her back. Not just to the Dwivedis’, but all the way back. Uma’s Appa ordered Chellam’s Appa to collect her today; neither of them could have predicted the inconvenient drizzle. Father to father, (rich) man to (poor) man, they have agreed that Chellam will be ready at such-and-such a time to be met by her Appa and led from the Big House all the way up the unpaved, rock-and-clay length of Kingfisher Lane to the bus stop on the main road, and from there onto the bus to Gopeng, and from the Gopeng bus station down more roads and more lanes until she arrives back at square minus one, the one-room hut in the red-earth village whence she emerged just a few years ago.

A year from today, Chellam will be dead. Her father will say she committed suicide after a failed love affair. The villagers will say he beat her to death for bringing shame to her family. Chellam herself will say nothing. She will have cried so much by then that the children will have nicknamed her Filthyface for her permanent tear stains. All the women of the village won’t be able to wash those stains off her cold face, and when they cremate her, the air will smell salty from all those tears.

At twenty to ten on this September Saturday morning, she begins to drag her empty suitcase down the stairs from the storeroom where it has lived since she came a year ago. How long ago did your Appa tell her to start packing? Amma mutters. Didn’t we give her a month’s notice? So much time she had, and now she’s bringing her bag down to start!

But Chellam’s suitcase, unlike Uma’s, could never have taken a month to pack. Uma had been made to find space for all these: brand-new wool sweaters, panties with the price tags still on, blazers for formal occasions, authentic Malaysian souvenirs for yet-unmade friends, batik sarongs and coffee-table books with which to show off her culture, framed family portraits taken at Ipoh’s top studio, extra film for a latest-model camera. Chellam owns, not including what she’s wearing today, a single chiffon saree, three T-shirts (one free with Horlicks, one free with Milo; one a hand-me-down from Mr. Dwivedi, her old boss), four long-sleeved men’s shirts (all hand-me-downs from Appa), three cotton skirts with frayed hems, one going-out blouse, and one shiny polyester skirt unsuitable for housework because it sticks to her thighs when she sweats. She also has four posters that came free with copies of Movieland magazine, but has neither the strength nor the will to take them down. Where she’s going, she won’t have a place to put them. All in all, it will therefore take her three minutes flat to pack, but even her mostly empty suitcase will be a strain for her weak arms only made weaker by her lack of appetite over the past few months.

Amma will not offer Chellam tea coffee sofdrink before she goes, though she and Suresh and Aasha are just sitting down to their ten o’clock tea, and though one mug of tea sits cooling untouched on the red Formica table as Appa stands at the gate under his enormous black umbrella, speaking with Chellam’s father. There wouldn’t be time for Chellam to drink anything anyway. There’s only one afternoon bus from Gopeng to the bus stop half a mile from their village, and if she and her father miss the eleven o’clock bus to Gopeng, they’ll miss that connecting bus and have to walk all the way to their village, pulling the suitcase along behind them on its three working wheels. Chellam will probably have to do most of the pulling, and hold her father by the elbow besides, because he is drunk as usual.

Thud thud thud goes her suitcase down the stairs, its broken wheel bent under it like a sick bird’s claw. The suitcase has done nothing but sit empty in the storeroom all year, but its straps and buckles have worn themselves out and it seems now to be held shut only by several long lengths of synthetic pink raffia wound and knotted around it to keep the geckos and cockroaches out. On the uncarpeted landing the sharp edge of the broken wheel scrapes loudly against the floor. Amma flinches and shudders. Look, look, she whispers urgently to Suresh and Aasha without taking her eyes off Chellam. "Purposely she’s doing it. She is taking revenge on us it seems. For sending her home. As if after all she’s done we’re supposed to keep her here and feed her it seems."

Suresh and Aasha, wide-eyed, say nothing.

In the past two weeks the many burdens they must share but never discuss have multiplied, and among them is this suddenly effusive, outward-turned Amma who whispers and nudges, who coaxes and threatens, who leans towards them with her face contorted like a villain in an old Tamil movie, desperate for a reaction. It’s as if the events of the past two weeks have dissolved the last of her reserve. This is the final victory towards which she’s been privately ascending during all those long days of dead silence and tea left to cool, though precisely what the victory is neither Suresh nor Aasha is completely sure. They’re sure only that whatever it is, it has come at too high a price.

Mildly discouraged by the children’s unresponsiveness, Amma takes a small, exacting sip of her tea. Chhi! Too much sugar I put, she remarks conversationally.

For all we know, Amma says, newly galvanized by her too-sweet tea, perhaps, or the mulishness of her children’s ears and brows, or the hesitation of Chellam and her empty suitcase on each separate stair, she’s pregnant.

The word, so raw they can almost smell it, contorts Amma’s mouth, offering the children an unaccustomed view of her teeth. It makes Suresh drop his eyelids and retreat into the complex patterns he’s spent his young life finding in the tabletop Formica. Men in bearskins. Trees with faces. Hook-nosed monks.

On top of everything she has taken all that raffia from the storeroom without even asking, Amma observes with a sigh and a long, loud slurp of her tea. Even this is out of character: Amma usually drinks her tea in small, silent sips, her lips barely parting at the rim of her mug.

For her journey home, Chellam has dressed herself in a striped men’s shirt with a stiff collar and a brown nylon skirt with a zipper in the back. The shirt is a hand-me-down from Appa. The skirt isn’t. Look at her, Amma says again through a mouthful of Marie biscuit, this time to no one in particular. Just look at her. Dares to wear the shirt I gave her after all the havoc she’s caused. Vekkum illai these people. No bloody shame. Month after month I packed up and gave her your Appa’s shirts. Courthouse shirts, man, Arrow brand, nice soft cotton, all new-new. In which other house servants wear that type of quality clothes?

In no other house, thinks Suresh. There aren’t any other houses, at least on Kingfisher Lane, staffed with scrawny servant girls dressed in oversized hundred-percent cotton courthouse shirts. If they’d saved Appa’s ties they could’ve had her wear those as well. And a bowler hat and gloves. Then they could’ve had her answer the door like a butler.

Hmph, Amma snorts into her teacup, here I was trying to help her out, giving her clothes and telling her she could save her money for more useful things.

Financial counseling and free shirts: a special Big House–only package deal. It had filled Amma with purpose and consequence, and had indeed impelled Chellam to try to save her money for More Useful Things. That is, until she realized that her father would turn up month after month to collect her wages on payday at the Big House, and that she was therefore saving her money for his daily toddies and samsus. For the back-street arrack that gave him the vision and vigor to beat his wife and children at home, and the cloudy rice wine the toddy shop owner made in a bathroom basin. Still, if you asked Chellam’s father (or the toddy shop owner), these were all Useful Things.

In the end look what she’s done with my charity and my advice, Amma says, wrapping up her tale with a jerk of the head towards the staircase. She’s taken them and thrown both one shot in my face. Just wait, one by one the others also will be doing the same thing. Why not? After seeing her example they’ll also become just as bold. Vellamma can murder me, Letchumi can murder Appa, Mat Din can burn the house down, and Lourdesmary can stand and clap. Happily ever after.

Aasha and Suresh silently note that they themselves are absent from this macabre prophecy. If Amma’s words can be taken at face value, the long fingers of fate will clutch at Suresh and Aasha but miss; for this they should probably feel lucky.

But they don’t.

Suresh is grateful only that Chellam doesn’t understand much English and is slightly hard of hearing (from all the clips her father’s fists, heavy with toddy and samsu, visited upon her ears in childhood). He notes that for some reason she’s left her suitcase leaning against the banister and hurried back upstairs. He isn’t going to point this out to Amma.

Aasha rocks back and forth in her chair so that her stretched-out toes, on every forward rocking, brush against Suresh’s knees under the table. It makes her feel better that he has knees, even if Uma has disappeared forever and Amma has been strangely transformed. He has knees. And again he has knees. Each time he has knees.

Behind Amma something stirs the curtains. Not wind, it’s not that sort of movement—not a gentle billowing, not a filling and unfilling with air, but a sudden jerk, as if someone’s hiding behind them, and sure enough, when Aasha checks she sees that her grandmother’s transparent ghost feet are peeking out from under the curtains, the broad toes she knows so well curling upward on the cool marble. So. Paati is back again, two weeks after her death, and for the very first time since her rattan chair was burned in the backyard. She’s not so easily scared off, is she? While everyone else is otherwise preoccupied, Paati’s hand darts out from behind the curtains, helps itself to a stray Marie biscuit crumb on the table beside Suresh’s plate, and slips back to its hiding place. And how would the others explain that? wonders Aasha in high dudgeon. What would they say, the faithless, doubting blind, who have stubbornly resisted the idea of Paati’s continued presence, and rolled their eyes at Aasha whenever she has tried to convey to them the needs and fears of Mr. McDougall’s daughter, the Big House’s original ghost and the one who has stuck by Aasha through all her losses and longings? No such thing as ghosts, they’ve scoffed (all except for Chellam, but other shortcomings mar her record). Now Aasha laps up this moment thirstily, thinks a flurry of I-told-you-so’s to herself.

Standing across from each other on either side of the gate, Appa and Chellam’s father are reflected in the glass panel of the open front door. Insider and outsider, bigshot lawyer and full-of-snot laborer, toothful and toothless. Chellam’s father’s dirty white singlet is spattered with rain; Appa holds his umbrella perfectly erect above his impeccably slicked-and-styled hair.

"Tsk, Amma says, leaning forward to peer at the glass panel, your father’s tea will be ice cold by the time he comes in. That man is a pain in the neck, I tell you. Normal people will know, isn’t it, okay, my daughter has caused so much trouble, better I shut up and go away quietly? But not him. No bloody shame. She takes a biscuit from the biscuit plate. Of course, she says, and here she shifts her gaze from the glass panel back to the children, looking from one to the other, raising her eyebrows to impart to them the full extent of her inside knowledge, if you want to talk about shameless men—"

Suresh pulls the biscuit plate towards himself, loudly grating its bottom against the table. Only Marie biscuits? he says plaintively. No more chocolate wafers?

Amma pauses with her own biscuit halfway to her mouth. She smiles knowingly, leans her head back, exhales, but Suresh, oh brave soldier sister-savior Suresh, does not yield. He holds her gaze, and wordlessly they do battle. For five terrible seconds she sweeps her searchlight eyes over Suresh’s face.

No, says Amma finally, no more chocolate wafers. Her eyes are still restless. I’ll have to send Mat Din to the shop.

And Nutella, says Suresh quickly, seizing the advantage. Marie biscuits are much nicer with Nutella.

We’ll have to make a list, says Amma. Nutella also finished.

Aasha lets go of the edge of her chair and slips her hands under her bottom on the seat. Under the chair she swings her legs. They will make a list. Tomorrow or next week Amma will give it to Mat Din the driver along with ten ringgit for petrol. He will take the list to a provision shop in town and come back with a carful of groceries: chocolate wafers, Nutella, rice, mustard seeds, star anise for mutton curry, tinned corn and peas to go with chicken chops. Lourdesmary the cook will put everything away, grumbling about the papaya seeds masquerading among the peppercorns and the staleness of the star anise. And life will go on as it did before Chellam ever arrived, or even better, except there’ll be new ghosts in the house: the ghost of dead Paati, growing younger and older and younger again, wrinkles melting into dimples and dimples into hollows, now a toddler, now a bride, now an old lady with a back as curved as a coconut shell; the ghost of Uma Past, suspended in time and forever eighteen years old; and far more terrible than the others, though Aasha doesn’t know it yet, will be the ghost of Chellam Future, her eyes wild as she screams to them from her funeral pyre, the ends of her hair already aflame, whole bitter planets orbiting at the back of her gaping mouth.

The two voices at the gate drone on and on. The wheedling dances sorrowfully around the weary voice, now grabbing at it, now stroking it, now tying it lovingly in knots as it falls lower and lower, so low they have to strain to hear it under the gentle fingerwork of raindrops on the metal awning, the whir of the ceiling fan, and the buzzing of a fly that has just entered the dining room. In the glass panel of the front door Amma sees Chellam’s father shake his head and wring his wrists like a woman. Then he wipes his cheeks with the heels of his hands, one after the other. He whimpers and moans, and his tremulous voice breaks and bubbles with drink and phlegm. Appa watches wordlessly. From the way he holds his shoulders under his umbrella Suresh can tell that he’s waiting for Chellam’s father to ask him for something. At best, more tea or a slice of plain bread. At worst, fifty ringgit. Or twenty. Or even two—just enough, he liked to say (as a glorious, conscience-pricking coup before he was given the fifty ringgit he knew he’d get every time), for a handful of amaranth leaves from his neighbor’s tree to go with his children’s lunchtime rice. But this time Chellam’s father doesn’t ask for any of these things; he grovels on behalf of his daughter, who hasn’t the shame to do it herself. Useless girl, saar, he says. I should’ve drowned her when she was born. Appa’s shoulders remain stiffly squared two inches below his ears.

Chellam is huffing and puffing once again, dragging her suitcase through the house’s endless, haphazard corridors. Eh! What is this? Amma whispers, low, urgent, her eyes darting around the room as if the confirmation of her suspicions might lie behind a painting or inside an urn. Why she took so long to come down the stairs? Halfway down she must’ve gone back up, you see! And what was she doing up there all this time? Very funny. Very strange.

In the evening Amma will find two ringgit missing from the glass bowl in which she keeps change for the roti man and the newspaper man, and Chellam will be accused in her absence of one last crime, pettier perhaps than the one for which she has been expelled from the Big House, but more shameless given everything that has transpired. Insult to injury, salt to an open wound, another inch taken from the yard of mercy they’ve already given her. Accused she will remain, until one night Appa happens to mention that the Volvo has been looking quite nice since he gave Mat Din two ringgit from the glass bowl to polish and wax it. (In fact, Chellam went back upstairs in a mostly futile attempt to impose some order on a storeroom thrown into disarray by the hasty extrication of her suitcase from under a pile of old newspapers.)

In the distance, Chellam’s suitcase slides and grates on the marble floor, and Chellam herself wheezes and sniffs from the cold that never seems to leave her. Across the dining room she shambles, and into her room under the stairs, where her clothes lie in a heap on her unmade bed. From the walls Kamal Hassan, Jayasudha, Sridevi, and Rajnikanth eye her glossily: Chellam, Chellam, they chide her, all the months you gazed at us while trying to fall asleep, at our forelocks and our noserings and our flared nostrils, and today you ignore us like this? But Chellam’s mind is elsewhere this morning, and besides, squatting over her suitcase, she’s much too far away from their film-star faces to see anything more than the blur of their uniformly wheatish complexions. The suitcase lid swooshes as she drops it and then presses down on it to retie the raffia. She turns the suitcase around and around, pulling the raffia so hard the fibers leave red welts on her palms. She drags the suitcase the few remaining yards to the front door, rubbing her nose with an index finger.

Chhi! Amma says, the syllable exploding directly into her mug of tea. Can’t even be bothered to find a tissue! If she’d listened to your Appa and started packing nicely one month ago she wouldn’t be in such a mess now, all kacan-mucan running here running there and sniffing and gasping all over the place, isn’t it?

The sniffing, the wheezing, the scraping, and the grating grow fainter and fainter.

Good riddance to bad rubbish, Paati mouths behind the curtain. Aasha manages to read her lips through the fabric, thanks only to a superhuman feat of concentration.

Through the window on the other side of the dining room, Chellam finally appears in the garden. Aasha and Suresh can see her, but Amma can’t. Her determined suitcase-dragging has worked the zipper on her skirt slowly around to her left hip. Her collar has twisted itself to one side, and a button has come undone at her waist. An inch of her stomach shows through the gap, creamy brown, lighter than the rest of her, perhaps pregnant, perhaps not. Unaware she’s being watched, she leans her suitcase against the ornamental swing and tugs at her waistband to bring the zipper round to the back again. She buttons the undone button, straightens her collar, and smoothes her frizzy hair. Then, with great difficulty, she drags her suitcase out to the gate, picking it up and kicking it weakly every time a bit of gravel gets caught in its wheels.

Shall we go, Appa? she says to her father in Tamil. She doesn’t look at Aasha and Suresh’s Appa.

He doesn’t look at her, either. With his long tongue he worries a desiccated coconut fiber that’s been stuck between his molars since lunch. He looks at the ground and scratches his left ankle with the toe of his right slipper, still holding his umbrella perfectly erect.

Chellam’s father delivers a quick, blunt blow to the side of her head. Taking ten years to come with her suitcase, he grunts to Appa. God knows what she was doing inside there for so long. Bloody useless daughter I have, lawyer saar, he continues, revving up his engine, you alone know how much shame she has brought upon me, you alone know what a burden a daughter like this can be. He looks from his daughter to Appa and from Appa to his daughter. He hawks and spits into the monsoon drain, and his spittle runs red with betel juice, staining the sides of the culvert as it dribbles. How, lawyer saar, how will you forgive—

That all you don’t worry, says Appa. Forgiving-shorgiving all you don’t worry, Muniandy. Just take your daughter and go. Go away and leave us alone.

Okay, enough of it, says Amma inside the house. What for all this drama now? Are they waiting for the violin music or what? Why won’t he buzz off?

The latch on the gate clicks shut and Chellam and her father are gone, she pulling the suitcase, her sozzled father swaying behind her. Till the end of her numbered days the green of the weedy verges she passes on her ignominious retreat will be stamped on the insides of Chellam’s eyelids; she will hear the neighbors’ whispers in her ears on quiet mornings; whenever it rains she will smell the wet clay and feel her feet sink with each step and her shoulder ache from the weight of her broken suitcase.

Appa stands with one foot on the lowest rung of the gate, watching them as they go. All down the street faces hang behind window curtains like dim bulbs.

Sure enough, Mrs. Malhotra from across the street mutters to herself, they’re sending the girl home. These days you simply cannot trust servants. She turns from the window and looks at her old father, who sits rocking in his chair and humming urgently like a small child needing to pee. Arre, Bapuji! she cries. You lucky-lucky only that we haven’t dumped you into a servant’s lap, yah, otherwise you’ll also be dead and gone by now!

The Wongs’ retarded son, Baldy, points at them as they pass the house next door, where Amma’s parents used to live until they died three years ago. Baldy crows through the branches of the mango tree in which he’s perched in the rain, but nobody pays him any attention. His father’s at work. His mother’s peeling shallots in the kitchen. The neighbors are all used to him.

"Don’t say retarded, Amma had scolded the first time Appa had used the word to describe Baldy. He’s just a bit slow, that’s all."

To retard is to slow, Appa had said. "Ecce signum: the inestimable OED." He’d pulled the dictionary off the bookshelf in the sitting room and laid its dusty black cardboard cover on Amma’s breakfast plate.

Okay, enough of it, Amma’d said then, and pushed her chair back so vehemently to leave the table that her tea sloshed onto her saucer. But Uma and Appa had shared a triumphant, twinkling grin, and even Suresh and Aasha had got the joke.

No curtains are stirring at the Manickams’ window three doors down: the former Mrs. Manickam is lying in bed in Kampong Kepayang eating peeled and pitted longans from the hand of her new husband, who leaves the office early every day for this very purpose, and Mr. Manickam is at the office though it’s a Saturday, burying his sorrows in work as usual.

Looklooklook, says Mrs. Balakrishnan farther down the street, flicking her husband’s sleeve as he sits reading the newspaper. Sure enough man, they’ve sent the girl off from the Big House. What for all this drama now? Now only they’ll sit and cry. As if it will bring the old lady back. When she was sitting in her corner the whole time they were complaining only. Cannot manage her it seems. Must get another servant it seems. Too grand to look after her themselves. That’s what too much money will get you in the end. Just troubles and tears.

With one foot Appa sweeps a few dead leaves and stray pebbles out under the gate. Then he turns and makes his way back to the house, dragging his Japanese slippers on the gravel. For a few seconds he stands looking up at the tops of trees as if he were a visitor admiring the lush foliage, his umbrella turning like a Victorian lady’s parasol on his shoulder. Wah, wah, Mr. Raju, very nice, man, your garden! What kind of fertilizer you use? Big-House Uncle! shouts Baldy from the top of his tree next door. Uncle, Uncle, Big-House Uncle! Uncle ah! Uncle where? Uncle why? Appa looks right at Baldy but says nothing. Then, as if he’s suddenly remembered something important, he starts and strides briskly into the house.

What are you two sitting there wasting time for? he asks Suresh and Aasha as he enters the dining room. As if the whole family must sit and bid a solemn farewell to the bloody girl like she’s the Queen of England on a state visit. Go and do your homework or read a book or do something useful, for heaven’s sake.

The children’s heads turn towards Amma, and they sit holding their breath and biting their lips, waiting for her permission. To go and do their homework (although Aasha doesn’t really have any). To read a book. To do unnamed useful things. To scamper off and live children’s lives (or to discover that such a thing has become impossible for them, even after the morning’s promise of a new beginning) and leave Amma bereft at a crumb-scattered table, with no audience.

What? What are you looking at me for? says Amma. "As if I wanted you to sit here. Both of you sitting with your busybody backsides glued to your chairs as if this whole tamasha is a Saturday morning cartoon, and now looking at me as if I’m the one who wouldn’t let you go."

A tiny gust of air escapes Appa’s nostrils. A laugh, a snip of surprise, a puff of fear. Good grief, Appa thinks, it’s true: she’s kept them here to witness her righteous fury at Chellam the Ingrate. And not just to witness it—to share it, to catch the whole rolling mass of rage with nowhere else to go, to parcel it out for future use. Lesson One: how some people turn against you even After Everything you’ve done for them.

He unfolds the two-color map of his wife in his head and adds to it another little landmark, a white dot before the border. Call it Shamelessness. Call it Stopping-at-Nothing, a triple-barreled name for a quaint English village. From the pit of his belly his own ravaging shamelessnesses threaten to rise in twos and threes and fours into his chest, waiting to accuse him in their discordant voices of calling the kettle black, waiting for him to acknowledge that the children have been caught between his old shamelessnesses and her new ones. He blinks and swallows, and thinks instead of the children’s pause for permission. That’s what has really jolted him, not this sudden change in his wife. That’s what has sent cold air spiraling out his nostrils in two swift exclamation points. She’s kept them here, he thinks, and they know it. For some reason he can’t put his finger on, this frightens him. His head swims a little, as if he’s just woken from a dream in which chickens talked and suns turned into moons.

He shakes his head and strides past them to calm his nerves with a cool shower in a bathroom humming with the ghost of his dead mother, before driving off the screen into an alternate universe in which he can forget the intransigent truths of this one.

In the kitchen Amma puts the dishes in the sink, and says, without turning around, Next time why don’t you just go with your father on Lourdesmary’s days off ? You want me to plan each Saturday night dinner one week in advance or what? Write out a full dinner menu with a fountain pen? Wear white gloves to serve you from silver trays? Then she goes up to her room and stays there until Suresh and Aasha have made and eaten a dinner composed of Emergency Rations: golden syrup on Jacob’s Cream Crackers, Milo powder straight from the tin, raw Maggi noodles broken into pieces and sprinkled with their grey (chicken-flavored) seasoning powder. At eight o’clock, Amma comes downstairs to eat her own dinner while listening to the kitchen radio in the half-dark. The radio’s still set to the Tamil station to which Chellam used to listen while combing Paati’s hair in the mornings. The theme song for the ten o’clock film-music program would always come on just as she pulled Paati’s hair into a silky white knot barely big enough for two hairpins. Now, though, there’s only a man with a gravelly, black-mustachioed voice interviewing a young lady doctor about the health benefits of almonds.

Suresh ceremoniously lays out his books and pencils, then takes his HB pencil and ruler out of their metal tin and starts his mathematics homework. Please can I have just— Aasha begins, and Suresh tears her a sheet of foolscap from his scrap paper pad and gives her a blue rollerball pen with a fat nib. On this cadged piece of paper Aasha draws an elaborate picture indecipherable to everyone but herself, a picture of Chellam the ex–servant girl, once beloved (but hated) and hated (but beloved) by Suresh and Aasha, now in ex-ile in her faraway village of red earth and tin roofs.

Ex-ile is an island for people who aren’t what they used to be. On that lonely island in Aasha’s picture Chellam wanders, tripping on blunt rocks in barren valleys, scaling sharp, windblown slopes on her hands and knees, minding starved cows that graze on rubbish heaps as if they’re mounds of fresh clover. Blindly arranging and rearranging clouds of dust and dirt and bloodstained bathroom buckets with a ragged broom. Inside her head a dozen snakes lie coiled around one another in a heavy mass. Inside her belly stands a tiny matchstick figure, a smaller version of herself, pushing against the round walls of its dwelling with its tiny hands.

This matchstick representation of Chellam is accurate in at least one respect: there is indeed a terrible colubrine knot of bad memories and black questions inside Chellam’s head that will die with her, un-hatched. Aasha outlines the snakes again and then colors and colors them till the ink spreads down into Chellam’s heavy-lobed, oversized ears.

"Tsk, Aasha, grumbles Suresh, wasting my good pen only. For nonsense like that can’t you use a pencil?"

Aasha caps the pen and rolls it across the table to Suresh with a pout. She climbs down from her chair and goes upstairs to sit in Uma’s empty room. Around her the night sings with crickets and cicadas, with creaky ceiling fans and the theme songs of all the television programs being watched all the way down Kingfisher Lane. Hawaii Five-O. B.J. and the Bear. Little House on the Prairie. Aasha’s quivering ears make out each one, separating them like threads on a loom, but downstairs she hears only silence. The silence, too, can be teased apart like threads: the silence of Amma staring out the kitchen window into the falling darkness. The silence of Appa’s empty study, from which there are no rustlings of papers or whistlings of tunes. The silence of Suresh doing his homework all alone, feeling guilty for grumbling about his wasted pen. The silence of Paati, whose weightless, see-through body bumps noiselessly into furniture and walls, looking for the unraveling rattan chair on which she once sat all day in her mosquito-thronged corner. Merciful flames have freed the chair’s spirit just as Paati’s cremation freed hers, but the chair hasn’t reappeared to sit transparently in its corner, and Paati is inconsolable. Her clear-glass joints creak silently as she settles onto the floor where her chair used to be.

A small voice outside the window says: That’s how Paati knows she’s dead. Her chair isn’t there anymore. Aasha turns to see her oldest (yet very young) ghost friend perched on the wide windowsill, tilting her head as she sometimes does. If Aasha were tall enough and strong enough to open this window on her own she would, though Mr. McDougall’s daughter’s not asking to be let in this time.

"You remember how I knew I was dead, don’t you?" She doesn’t look at Aasha as she asks the question, but off into the distance, so as to hide her great yearning for the correct answer.

Yes, says Aasha, of course I do. But tell me again anyway.

When I couldn’t see the sunlight and the birds. Before that I was alive, the whole time my Ma and I were sinking down through the pond—there were no fish in it at all, it was silent and dark like a big empty church—but I could see the light far away at the top, above the water. When I couldn’t see it anymore, that’s when I was dead.

Aasha lays her head on Uma’s pillow, curls up, and closes her eyes